There is no official tally of how many students have become victims of explicit deepfakes, but their stories are mounting faster than school officials are prepared to handle the abuse. Last fall, girls who'd attended a dance at Issaquah High School in Washington state discovered that a fellow student had created explicit versions of photographs taken of them at the event, using software powered by artificial intelligence. In February, a 13-year-old girl in Southern California accepted a friend request on her private TikTok account from a male classmate. He then used a screenshot from a video ..read more

A newly released report alleges Big Tech's ad transparency tools are failing across the board — with X scoring the worst at providing meaningful data that can help users, journalists, and advocates keep a watchful eye on scams and disinformation. If "ad transparency" isn't a familiar term, that's probably because it's a somewhat counterintuitive concept. With TV ads, you generally know the sponsor — it's announced front and center. Digital ads are more slippery. Even when the fact that something is an ad is disclosed, exactly who is advertising what, and why still may not be clear. If a platf ..read more

The phrase, "There's a censorship problem in the United States," is a homing beacon for political and social division — instantly casting a sense of wariness about who is uttering it and for what aim. But it's also true. From continued legislative attacks on inclusive education to digital "shadowbanning" of accounts in social media algorithms, content is often gate-kept from the masses.  Frida Uncensored, a new website launched alongside the cult favorite maternity brand's new fertility products, addresses this ongoing issue from a different perspective: One that hopes to circumvent the ..read more

The modern feminist movement isn’t an ambiguous, shapeless mist that has acted of its own volition over decades. It’s made up of people. Women and their allies, whose courage, determination, and will to resist, organise, research, demonstrate, and outright demand the right to equality and justice can’t truly be captured in a couple of hours. But directors give it a shot anyway. There’s a notably limited amount of mainstream feature films that depict those who have stood at the forefront of the fight for women’s equality, but there are some truly excellent ones among those that have been made ..read more

Oura, the company behind the sleek wearable health ring all over wellness circles and the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, debuted its new Oura Labs beta testing site for members last month. It's an incubator for experimental health features like its recently announced, illness-spotting Symptom Radar. The radar, which detects biometric levels like temperature, resting heart rate, and respiratory rate, is specifically not advertised as an illness detection tool, but rather a tool to "help you understand your body's signals," the company explained in a March post. "Symptom Radar assesses your biometri ..read more

For all the digital tools and AI-guided apps that can help us navigate our mental health and wellbeing, you can't get there without spending time away from screens. Or, in the more succinct language of online arguments: go touch grass. But maybe touching a sticker somewhere close to your screens can help ground you too. That's the claim of Calm Strips, reusable "sensory stickers" you may have seen popping up in ads or suggested posts on TikTok and Instagram. These colorful tactile stickers aren't just cashing in on trendy Danish pastel aesthetics, they're tapping into broad demand for neurodi ..read more

For many of us, the word "ritual" has a lot of weighty significance to it. A religious ceremony, an unshakeable family tradition, or hallowed cultural rite might come to mind. But according to Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton, rituals needn't be age-old practices imbued with meaning. Instead, we can and should create our own, out of small but emotionally powerful acts. Even drinking the same tea from a beloved mug every day can have the power to boost our well-being. Norton, author of The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions, sa ..read more

Since the dawn of the internet, users have gone online to escape. They've flooded forums to build community when the outside world was lacking, and they've delved into fantasy worlds, fanfiction, and original characters to explore the limits of personal identity. In the '00s, online accounts, from the blinged-out Myspace pages to fantasy RPG profiles, were exaggerations of real-life personalities or total aliases, intended to obscure reality in favor of something completely different than who they are IRL.  But in modern times, the internet is fiending for authenticity — even if it's har ..read more

Psychologist Glen Moriarty founded the emotional support platform 7 Cups in 2013 as a way to help people listen to each other's concerns, particularly when they had nowhere else to turn. Users are free to be as vulnerable as they wish, provided they obey the platform's community guidelines and terms of service.  The platform, which users can join at no cost, may seem like the perfect solution to both the loneliness epidemic and the broken American mental health care system, which is expensive and hard to access.  But for some users, 7 Cups comes with its own high cost: trolling and ..read more

At a time when loneliness is a crisis, HearMe is Adam Lippin's calling. He founded the digital platform in 2018 as a place where a user can talk to someone online and "get something off your chest." The platform matches that user with a "peer listener" who's meant to be supportive. Both people can remain anonymous.   But Lippin eventually learned that not everyone who logs onto a platform like HearMe has a sincere interest in making an emotional connection. In 2022, it became clear that some users were visiting HearMe to play out fantasies that involved sexual language and innuendo ..read more